I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Gimlet’s Cheeseburger, with Broadsheet
By Rory McKenna for Broadsheet, 16 May 2023
With a dill-packed house-made sauce, juicy meat patty and fluffy potato bun, it’s got to be one of Melbourne’s best. It’s only available two nights a week, and only after 10pm.
In early March this year, I started to hear whispers around town that Gimlet had a cheeseburger on its menu. I hadn’t been to Gimlet before, but I’d heard many people’s enthusiastic reviews of their experience: and never once was the word “cheeseburger” mentioned.
The idea of a burger on the menu at Andrew McConnell’s glamorous restaurant sounded both out of place and alluring at the same time.
I jumped online to confirm the rumours, and quickly discovered that the burger was only available on Gimlet’s supper menu, strictly after 10pm. I grabbed my phone, mass-messaged the group chat and within 90 seconds had a date (and a date) to experience it for myself – the following Friday at the stroke of midnight.
When first placed on the table, on a scalloped white plate, the burger seemed to look at me with a polite glance. I looked back, foolishly thinking it was going to be just another burger. I was wrong.
The combination of tang, sweetness, and dill notes hit me with unexpected force – the result of a careful and considered spread of dill pickles, white onions, butter lettuce and dill-packed house burger sauce that the Gimlet team assembles either side of the beef patty.
The thick – I mean really thick – and juicy patty was one of the best I’ve tasted. Its moreish flavour comes from a blended combination of chuck and brisket cuts sourced from Gippsland-raised O’Connor Beef, which is used throughout all of McConnell’s Trader House restaurants and is sold at his Meatsmith butchers. Two slices of American cheese overlap on top of the patty and it’s all encased in a fluffy potato bun.
There’s something incongruous about ordering a cheeseburger off a menu that has three types of caviar on it, in a venue suitable for a Norwegian prince (or a former American president), but that only makes the burger and the experience more irresistible.
For the following three Friday nights, I brought a new friend to eat the burger with me. Each time, like clockwork, I saw their eyes dilate to the size of dinner plates as they experienced their first bite.
A couple of months on, I’m now running out of fingers to count the number of different friends I’ve brought to the CBD to experience this burger with me. But I’m still planning when my next encounter will be – scrolling through my contacts to see whose Friday night I’m going to upgrade next.
